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How to Get the Most Value from The New Optimizely

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Jul 14 2022

Explore Icreon's Optimizely services

How Optimizely DXP Can Help Your Business Drive CX Outcomes

What’s the top strategic priority of Experience Leaders today? No doubt, it’s the Customer Experience (CX). With the world increasingly moving online, organizations are formally prioritizing the digital transformation of CX. They are focusing on how best to deliver excellent personalized experiences across all touchpoints and grow their customer base. Put simply, they are turning to Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) to provide positive experiences and efficiencies for customers, mainly through digital engagement. Optimizely is one such DXP that has been extending more marketing capabilities with its strategic acquisitions to help enterprise businesses achieve a successful ROI.

In this blog, we will discover how Optimizely unlocks digital potential for organizations that are highly focused on meeting and exceeding customer expectations to stay competitive in the market. 

Discover the new Optimizely and Why it Matters Most

In the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the marketing technology world. With the continuous advancement in Content Management Systems, Commerce, Marketing Automation and Personalization, we’ve seen many technologies are coming together under one brand to drive better business outcomes for experience brands. Following that solid strategic direction, Optimizely has come up as a powerful experience optimization tool with additional marketing capabilities by acquiring major technologies including, Idio, Insite, Zaius, and most recently Welcome to form their new enterprise DXP.

Gartner has positioned Optimizely as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.

Episerver acquired Optimizely in 2020, and the two companies moved forward under the Optimizely brand name in 2021. Episerver is best known for its CMS, Commerce, and Personalization capabilities. Over the years, with deep expansion in marketing and data analytics space, together they evolved as a modern DXP platform that has digital commerce capabilities and advanced tools for solid content management.

Content Cloud

Content Cloud is a leading Content Management System built on .NET technology and Microsoft Azure cloud. The platform is also used with any other programming language if the requirement is to run headless technology. It is excellent for managing and producing content that creates relevant and personalized experiences for customers. Content Cloud enables marketers to design relevant and personalized purchasing experiences. They can retrieve insights from data and analytics and do experimentation testing to make intelligent decisions and drive business growth.

 

Important Features of Content Cloud 

Commerce Cloud

Commerce Cloud is built on Microsoft .NET stack with deep integration capabilities. The platform has CMS and native Product Information Management (PIM) system capability to provide configurable shopping experiences for B2B and B2C buyers. B2B Commerce cloud comes with a suite of functionalities to build a brand and seamlessly combine campaigns, content, and commerce to enable digital rich solutions that unlock tremendous value.

Commerce Cloud enables full platform capabilities through headless architecture to connect to external systems. It streamlines product information flow and allows centralization of the supply chain through order orchestration and fulfillment processing.

3X
Businesses who prioritize CX drive 3x more revenue growth – IBM CEO Study

Optimization

Optimization includes a suite of products like  experimentation & personalization tools, intelligent recommendations, and customer data platforms. These tools are highly useful for marketers to run simple experiments to validate website enhancements that will drive business ROI. They can maximize the value of customer data by leveraging experimentation and data platforms and analyzing what clicks to their customers. Combining content and commerce allows organizations to enable seamless buying experiences and drive faster growth.

Optimization Tech stack includes

  • Web & Full Stack (Experimentation + Personalization & Feature Management)
  • Content Intelligence (Content Recommendations & Product Recommendations)
  • Optimizely Data Platform (ODP & Data Intelligence)

These are all independent optimization products that can be implemented on any ecommerce or CMS platforms including Shopify, WordPress and Sitecore.   

Experimentation

Optimizely has experimentation personalization tools, including Client-side A/B Testing & Personalization, Server-side Full Stack Testing, and Feature Rollouts. Both client-side and server-side testing are important in the experimentation process because it helps determine which one would be the right choice for a business website or mobile app, optimization strategy and customers. 

Client-side Web Experimentation 

This type of experimentation is based on customer acquisition and engagement strategies. Front-end developers can create simple tests using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or WYSIWYG editor. The testing can personalize and deliver multiple groups with tailored experiences. The tool is easy for growth marketers to run A/B tests and launch personalization campaigns easily. 

Server-side Full Stack Experimentation

The server-side testing is based on feature adoption and product performance enhancement. It includes complex tests like feature flags, rollouts, price testing, navigation, search rules, and mobile app feature enhancements. The experimentation is performed by product engineering teams to analyze the impacts of feature enhancements in applications and rollouts.

Content Intelligence

Content Intelligence is focused on providing the right content and product recommendations based on targeted audiences and user segments. Content recommendation works on a user’s browsing history and preferences to know if the user has logged in. The tool then displays related content like articles, how-to guides, and FAQs to increase engagement and motivate users to dive further into the customer journey. What’s interesting is marketers can get insights on blog/articles/keyword performance and optimize the content further.

Similarly, product recommendations work best on commerce websites to suggest related items based on customer preferences, browsing history, or what a customer has added to her card. Content Intelligence tool provides the capability to experiment with different product recommendations that customers may find interesting. The main objective of adding comparable items for users is to increase ecommerce transactions. 

Optimizely Data Platform (ODP)

The ODP platform enables marketers to align their brands around the customer experience and let the customer experience agency do the heavy lifting of surfacing opportunities, automating repetitive tasks, and streamlining the whole content execution. Marketers identify the most relevant audience segments and which cohorts can drive revenue. AI-powered predictive analytics boost data-driven marketing by segmenting visitor groups on a website, app, and email campaigns in order to deliver personalized experiences. 

Latest addition: Optimizely’s latest Welcome acquisition is now empowering marketers across the brands to drive real business outcomes through better CX transformation. This tool brings powerful capabilities of content marketing platforms (CMP), marketing resource management (MRM), and digital asset management (DAM) together in one orchestration solution. The robust marketing orchestration platform allows marketers to plan, analyze, and distribute content across DXPs and CMSs. Marketing users have unprecedented control to manage the delivery of content to the right audience by leveraging customer data insights without involving IT. They can grow revenue using AI tools such as A/B testing and content recommendations across all marketing processes from creation to execution. 

79%
of customers say they like to receive more personalized responses to become loyal customers.
80%
of consumers considers CX is just as important as products and services offered by a company

What’s Next: Boundless Optimization and Personalization

As customer expectations keep surging, enhancing CX and digital solutions by personalizing DXP must be the main focus for businesses. With Optimizely DXP, companies can connect commerce and content platforms to deliver consistent buying experiences with better back-end connectivity. They can leverage the power of optimization tools to accelerate ROI growth.

At Icreon, we help customers achieve their key business goals by offering customer strategy consulting that guides them to extract the most value from Optimizely DXP. Whether you’re exploring new DXP as part of your digital transformation of CX or need help in dynamic personalization, user analytics & reporting, and AI-driven content presentation, Icreon has the depth of expertise on Optimizely Tools to partner with you on your journey.

Learn how Icreon can help you personalize and optimize your ecommerce capabilities in the growing digital economy. Explore Icreon's Optimizely services.